Instead of seeing the French Revolution as a failure, therefore, we should perhaps see it as the explosive start of a lengthy process. Such massive social and political change overturning millennia of...
Mozi believed that a policy could be called virtuous only if it enriched the poor, prevented pointless death, and contributed to public order.
For Dawkins, atheism is a necessary consequence of evolution. He has argued that the religious impulse is simply an evolutionary mistake, a ‘misfiring of something useful’, it is a kind if virus, para...
Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.
Sumer had devised the system of structural violence that would prevail in every single agrarian state until the modern period, when agriculture ceased to be the economic basis of civilization.
Muhammad preached his farewell sermon to the Muslim community. He reminded them to deal justly with one another, to treat women kindly, and to abandon the blood feuds and vendettas inspired by the spi...
When John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich, published Honest to God in 1963, stating that he could no longer subscribe to the old personal God out there, there was uproar in Britain. A similar furor has g...
The philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) often remarked We don’t know anything and believed that this was the most important philosophical truth.16
The good leader in war is not warlike The good fighter is not impetuous; The best conqueror of the enemy is he who never takes the offensive. The man who gets the most out of men is the one who treats...
Roman coins, inscriptions, and temples extolled Augustus, who had brought peace to the world after a century of brutal warfare, as Son of God, lord, and savior and announced the good news (euaggelia)...
The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The Quran prescribes some degree of segregation and veiling for the Prophet’s wives, bu...
Muhammad was convinced that unless the Quraysh reformed their attitudes and behavior, they too would fall prey to the anarchy that threatened to engulf the world. Under the inspiration of Allah, Muham...
The Qur’an was attempting to give women a legal status that most Western women would not enjoy until the nineteenth century. The emancipation of women was a project dear to the Prophet’s heart, but it...
The Quran gave women rights of inheritance and divorce centuries before Western women were accorded such status. The
Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, a...
Muhammad had become the head of a collection of tribal groups that were not bound together by blood but by a shared ideology, an astonishing innovation in Arabian society. Nobody was forced to convert...
But was the prototype of human existence; it was the original pattern or the archetype on which our life here below had been modeled.
The Deuteronomists had made violence an option in the Judeo-Christian religion. It would always be possible to make these scriptures endorse intolerant policies.
The Qur’an had begun to develop a primitive just war theory. In the steppes, aggressive warfare was praiseworthy; but in the Qur’an, self-defense was the only possible justification for hostilities an...
Fundamentalist faith was rooted in deep fear and anxiety that could not be assuaged by a purely rational argument.
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